


Dangerous Philosophy

by GoldenThreads



Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alien Character(s), Friendship, Gen, Identity Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-14
Updated: 2013-06-14
Packaged: 2017-12-14 21:03:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/841350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldenThreads/pseuds/GoldenThreads
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Determined to solve the puzzle of humanity, Danger scrutinizes every resource that crosses her path.  Since Warlock once wrestled with the very same questions himself, he is far too valuable a case study for her to ignore.</p><p>She really should have known better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dangerous Philosophy

**Author's Note:**

> A collection of Danger-Warlock interactions set between Necrosha and AvX. (Specific issue tags can be found at the end.)  
> In which Danger hones her interpersonal skills, Warlock juggles too many scripts, and they both end up with the data they always wanted.
> 
> Spoilers for their respective histories, especially Warlock’s time in Excalibur.
> 
> Background canon relationships making an appearance include: Warlock/Doug Ramsey, Danger/Madison Jeffries, and Warlock/Kitty Pryde friendship.
> 
>  
> 
> **As of 2014 and the All New X-Factor series, this is no longer canon compliant and will surely be jossed to hell and back.**

**i.**

Utopia has its own language. Warlock cannot harvest meaning from it, not like his selfsoulfriend does, but he still recognizes the rituals of normalcy performed around him, those everyday routines each resident follows without fail. He remembers simple, lazy days, but now the mutants hasten onward with a frantic energy. Sleep, training, study, more sleep. Those who do not study, teach. Those who do neither forge a place of their own.

Everyone on Utopia has a place, a job, a use. No time squandered.

Warlock has no part in this script.

He doesn’t mind very much. By now he is accustomed to being the odd one out. Only at night does he waver, when everyone heads off to sleep and leaves him with no one to sit beside, nowhere to try and make himself useful. No longer the television junkie of his youth, Warlock spends his nights roaming Utopia’s every nook and cranny. He stargazes from the highest tower of the compound, forages along the shoreline for consumables, and explores the underground levels with unprecedented stealth, unsure where he is and isn’t allowed to tread.

The X-Men have only just begun to trust his selfsoulfriend, admitting him to the mission ops and technical teams, and Warlock dares not endanger that tentative approval. Even so, he often finds himself among the walls of endless monitors and holotech, settling down at the station Doug has claimed as his own. Warlock doesn’t boot up any of the systems, doesn’t bother interfacing, just sits there and wishes he, too, could sleep.

Perhaps that is why she speaks to him. Pity.

**{Technarch.}**

Warlock’s eyes slide open. {Friendanger? Query: Self’s assistance required?} He only met Danger the once, but her hailing signal is unmistakable. He can sense her hard at work a few floors beneath in the X-Brig. {Supposition: Friendanger disinterested in Self, as reproduction not viable.} He means it teasingly, but his scripts are still a work in progress. It is difficult for him to judge what tone he broadcasts, let alone what cues he should use to guide her.

**{You misled me.}**

He can read her irritation most clearly, and wonders if she is similarly equipped with empathic sensors. Rude to ask, though. {Self did?}

**{You are more than you seem. You are not even machine.}**

{Self is techno-organic. Apologies if Friendanger was misinformed.} Warlock frowns at her, even though she cannot see. Just because he’s made of circuits doesn’t make him a machine!

**{Define.}**

Danger sounds so snippy. Why is she yelling at him? Maybe she dislikes other techno-organisms on her turf, though she doesn’t seem exceedingly fond of the mutants either.

{Query: Why sudden interest in Self?}

Her response is curiously delayed. **{I observe and extrapolate, and in this way study the humans. You are not human, you are not machine. You have your own paradigm, but all the data I have collected conflicts.}**

Suspicion. At least she admits to it. Warlock has often faced the suspicions of others, and he appreciates when they are this transparent. It keeps everyone safe. {Ask your questions, Friendanger.}

 **{The mutants believe you and I are similar.}** Yes, he figured as much when they tried to have her examine him. **{We are both alien, we are both tech-morphers. But there is a disconnect here which requires further explanation. Define yourself.}**

Tech-morpher? The humans keep inventing new words and still none of them fit properly. {Self did. Techno-organic. More precise classification: techno-formatted metamorph. From perspective of mutantfriends, techno-mechanical descriptors suitable. From your perspective, tech/techno differential more glaring.} Did that make sense? That didn’t make sense.

Yet instead of calling him on his fuzzy logic, she snaps, **{Why do you speak like that?}**

{…Self can switch scripts, if Friendanger prefers.}

**{That isn’t what I asked.}**

{…}

**{The humans think you simple. Harmless. Is that your game?}**

{Self does not…} He is so, so tired. {I have no game.} The switch is not quite natural, but he has forgotten what natural feels like. He pretended for Tyro for years, played the purest Technarch he could, but there is no practicing this.

**{That is not what I observe. You run constant interference between your programming and your performance.}**

{Yes.}

**{You admit it?}**

{It is true.}

**{…You are scared.}**

{I am many things, Friendanger. Just as many as you. Are _you_ scared?}

She doesn’t answer him, falling silent to analyze his admission, or perhaps to express her disdain at his dissembling. He didn’t really expect an answer anyway, just wanted to break her momentum.

Warlock changes tack, returning to her earlier question. {My native language is strict. English is mutable. I mutated it. Self speaks as Self prefers, but if it annoys you so much, I can try to match your eloquence.}

**{You prefer to converse in borrowed words.}**

{We have borrowed binary, too.}

Again she pauses, and Warlock wonders what expression she wears, if it twists on its own or waits for her command.

**{Your form is slipping.}**

Warlock startles and looks down at his hands, at the too-human fingers falling into place along the keyboard. He shifts back to his intended form, that feeble caricature of the Technarchy, and draws back his gaunt, mis-jointed digits. This is not Muir. This is not his place.

The doors to the lab slide open a second later, and Warlock’s heart leaps. He stands at once, offering the chair to its rightful owner.

“Good morning, Selfsoulfriendoug,” he chirps brightly.

Doug tilts his head slightly, surprised to find Warlock at the terminal. “Good morning.”

“Query: Selfsoulfriend has not yet eaten? Self will procure breakfastsustenance for you.”

“Great.” Doug sits down at his station, boots up the systems, and lays his fingers on the keyboard where Warlock’s had rested just moments before.

Warlock can see the dark shadows beneath his selfsoulfriend’s eyes and wishes he could wipe them away. If only the world were so simple, if only that could be his use. Instead he hastens back to the empty corridors and weaves his way upstairs to the mess hall.

He calls out to Danger to thank her for the rescue, but she isn’t listening. The comm channel she forged is closed.

 

 

**ii.**

A few nights later Danger joins him on the roof of the eastern tower. She rises on the gentle breeze, opulent wings spread wide as she bathes in the glow of the silver moon. The lights of the distant city twinkle through their delicate latticework, shimmering like stained glass. There is only one word for her and she knows it: Exquisite.

Warlock thinks of old movies, of gentlemen doffing their hats to fancy ladies, and the spines of his hair flatten themselves down in appreciation.

Now that she has flaunted her glory, Danger steps forward and collapses her wings along her spine, shifting them back into her frame. “Yearning for the stars?” she asks, voice even colder in person.

“Negative.” Warlock wonders how Tyro is doing, certainly, but there is nothing left for him on Kvch, let alone in the vast depths of the universe. All he has is right here on this island.

“Then what are you—ah.” She glances up at the night sky as well, then looks back at him to analyze the forlorn twist of his smile. “Pryde.”

Warlock shrugs his lanky shoulders. If Kitty were here, she would understand, she would have the perfect advice, she would give him that fond yet commanding smile and send him off to face his fears. She would rescue him like she has so many times before. She would know how to help his selfsoulfriend. She…oh, how his heart aches for would-have-beens.

Kitty always shone so bright. Now the stars themselves must seethe with jealousy to have her in their midst.

“You would not have made a difference,” Danger says. “I was present as well, and I made no difference. She did what had to be done.”

Her objectivity does nothing to mask her intent, and Warlock weighs her rough attempt at consolation. He has no trusted companion at his side, not when his selfsoulfriend is the most worrisome riddle of all. Kitty is lost, Rahne is missing. Illyana is cobbled together from corrupted backups, and it is far easier to avoid her than to admit he knows the feeling. His other selfriends are wonderful, of course, but in their eyes he may forever be a hapless child.

Danger is an impartial observer. Perhaps they can learn from each other.

“Thank you, Friendanger. Self knows your words are true. Self only wishes things were…different.” She is young, does she even know nostalgia? Warlock offers her a smile. “You have brought more questions?”

“Is that what you think this is? A game of questions and answers?”

Cat and mouse, more like. “Is it?”

She tsks in irritation, but continues nonetheless. “After more cohesive analysis, I have concluded there is only a 2% probability that you are a Trojan Horse.”

Warlock nods in approval. “Thank you for checking, Friendanger.”

“You aren’t offended?”

“Negative.”

“…You have been one before.”

“More than once.”

Danger bats her eyelashes at him, their points sharp as talons. There is something wrong with him, but that poses too broad a question—a question that is every question is the most difficult one to answer, this she knows well. His pieces are in the wrong order, but if she pries just so, if she fiddles, perhaps he can be fixed.

“Nearly three weeks have passed, yet you remain at minimal operating capacity,” she observes. “This contradicts all survival instincts.”

“Utopia cannot feed me.”

“Have you even asked?”

“You misunderstand. Utopia _cannot_ feed me. A Technarch’s hunger is vast. Insatiable. Costly. Self’s siredam devours suns for sustenance.” Warlock smiles sadly, his crest drooping behind him. “To live, we destroy. We have no other way.”

“Humans are the same,” argues Danger. Surely he knows this.

The corners of his smile twitch in amusement at the comparison. “Self is vegetarian, but alternative lifeglow sources offer insufficient sustenance. Self has grown too much.”

“You content yourself with surviving instead of thriving.”

“Appreciation. Friendanger understands.”

She scowls in distaste. Warlock made an effort at first, but already his words creep back to that infantile mode. Scripts, he calls them. His thoughts pour through these scripts like sand through a sieve, but there are too many sieves, and the words that make it out the bottom are a pale shadow of their origin. Danger wouldn’t even call them scripts—he must be approximating some untranslatable Technarch terminology, relying on the humans’ over-eagerness to explain him in technical language. She is still sour over mistaking him for a kindred post-organic.

“No, I do not,” she says. “It merely aligns with my other conclusions. You are a pacifist; you do all you can to protect instead of destroy. ”

“Affirmative.”

“Then why do you wear that loathsome shape?”

Danger’s demand is absolute, and he squirms beneath her judgmental eye. “Query…? Self capable of any shape.”

“Yet you choose that one consciously. If I distract you well enough, you become something else.”

Immediately Warlock double-checks his form, worried it has slipped yet again. Oh, but she is clever. “You choose yours, too,” he answers at length, embarrassed.

“I am not human. I do not want to be. I am my inside and my outside all at once.” The lights within her chest pulse dimly, and she inclines her head at him, the very picture of majesty.

 _She is spending too much time with Emma Frost_ , Warlock thinks bitterly to himself. He cannot tear his eyes away.

“Whereas you wear a skeleton, the aftermath of destruction, and pretend it could be no other way.” She reaches out to tap at one of his ribs.

“Manageable with low energy,” he argues, grabbing her wrist.

“It is off-putting. Calculatedly foreign. It keeps the mutants at a distance, so they will not see how else your shape has changed.”

Warlock tightens his fingers around her arm, though neither of them can feel it. “You would rather Self wear a humanform?”

“No, _you_ would prefer it.” Danger pulls away, so smug that she has cracked his code at last and slipped past his defenses. She will right him, she will free him. No more cages, not even the ones he forged himself. “Even I can perceive your reluctance. Why limit yourself for them?”

Warlock doesn’t answer her, and at first she thinks he has had some kind of epiphany. He is unearthly still.

“Do you think your precious Ramsey can’t read you just as well?” she presses.

{Leave.}

Danger startles at the ragged-edged cut of his binary, raw with an anger she never expected of him. He is not human, what flesh has he for her to flay, what bones to scour? Truth is all they have, however painful. She tips her head back and gazes at the heavens, dares to ask, “If Pryde were here, which face would you show her?”

The silence stretches on.

When she looks back down, he is long gone.

 

 

**iii.**

Danger gets her answer sooner than expected.

For two weeks she keeps her distance, observing him over endless video feeds as she works with her patients in the X-Brig. Change is minimal in all her subjects. Warlock takes on the slightest additional mass for a team mission, but his form remains startlingly forbidding in spite of that cheerful smile. There is no improvement in the boy’s countenance either, grim and pale-faced no matter how loyally Warlock dotes upon him.

She awaits the day he finally loses faith.

As if to spite her, the universe bestows upon Warlock a second miracle, and Kitty Pryde comes home.

Mostly.

It only takes X-Club a few hours to build a containment chamber for the girl’s phase-locked form, and Danger assists Madison Jeffries with its construction. A few of Pryde’s closest companions loiter around in solidarity: Wolverine looming with his arms crossed tight against his chest, Nightcrawler popping here and there with his dashing smile, Colossus still trying to reach her ghostly hand, a disgustingly lovestruck glimmer in his eyes. These are the relationships Danger has already cataloged in detail, and they interest her little. Soon enough Nemesis chases them all out, shouting about stress and recovery and, well, Danger stops listening after that. He shouts so much.

In the end Danger finds herself Pryde’s guardian, tasked with keeping the lab on lock-down until morning. They want the girl to have a bit of peace before the flood of visitors begins. No one reveals how Pryde is to find such peace when she cannot sleep or cry or speak. She cannot even shovel ungodly amounts of ice cream into her mouth as Danger has seen so many of Utopia’s residents do after particularly stressful missions.

Pryde just floats there in her chamber, stewing with misery.

Danger selects mercy for her next experiment. When Warlock turns up seeking entry to the lab a few hours before dawn, the doors slide open before he even reaches them and lock behind him just as promptly. She spies on them from afar, watches Warlock flicker through so many other faces before resting his forehead against the glass of the containment chamber. Pryde tips her own ghostly face against it from the other side. They are quiet together, and it is reunion enough.

Danger erases the feed, furious with herself in a way she cannot explain.

But she has her answer.

 

 

**iv.**

There are no more miracles after that. There is only the war.

Danger fails them all.

No one speaks to her after the Blackbirds burn. No one has the time. This is homo superior’s last stand, and suddenly her place among them is tenuous at best. They evacuate non-combatants to the Atlantean column, deputize every mutant on the island, and shut down the upper levels of Utopia in swift order. They hatch their genius plans without her.

They march off to die without her.

Danger eavesdrops on their comm links and pours over the data to find some way to help, to redeem herself. She misplaced a prisoner, just one, just for fifteen minutes, and now they will all die. _You were born to kill them,_ hums a traitorous line of code. _Your job is almost done._

Damn them, damn them and their techno-organic virus, wreaking havoc on her sensory systems with its foreign, unstable signal. She became so accustomed to ignoring the anomaly, and her indifference played right into the enemy’s hand. Were they Trojan Horses after all, lulling her into complacency so Pierce could do his work? The strangest wave of guilt washes over her. Now is a terrible time to twist logic and shift the blame of her own inadequacy.

…Guilt?

Danger silences herself, pausing for the slightest moment of system analysis. There is no mistake: this flood of guilt is not her own.

Her scan zeros in on Med-Bay: three mutant life signs, Pryde’s containment chamber, and an energy beacon shining bright as a supernova right outside, bleeding tortured shame through the cracks of their locked comm channel.

She is not the only weapon the X-Men left behind.

 

Danger finds him huddled outside the doors to the infirmary, his head cradled in his hands. The cadaverous form she so loathed is no more. Now Warlock has meat on those bones, shines sleek and golden with boundless potential. Light worms its way along the joints of his armored plates, the frenzied energy within him desperate to escape its cowering master. She knows what they fed him to forge a tool of such destruction.

She calls his name and he flinches away. She wanted the Technarch triumphant; she didn’t want _this_.

He doesn’t answer, but she can feel the weight of his attention fall upon her.

“Warlock, listen to—” Danger barely has a chance to begin before his focus breaks, skittering away to huddle uselessly within his cracks. She thought he was broken before, a puzzle to be solved, but now his core is shattered into dust in the wind.

Humans call it a moral compass. While Warlock would probably spout more nonsense about scripts, Danger expects the same concept holds true. His has been irreparably shaken by the blood on his hands, but there is no time to rebuild him. There will never be time.

Danger sharpens her claws and aims for the heart beneath the rubble. “Ramsey did this to you. He ran the calculations and knew his faithful pet would sacrifice its every oath if he only asked.”

Warlock’s gaze rises to meet hers, and his eyes narrow dangerously.

“It isn’t surprising, I’ve seen the odds myself. Any one of them would have used you to save their own skin.”

“Family. Self’s proxyfamily.”

“A family? You fool yourself. Your team—do they ever ask for your advice? Your opinion? No, I have seen. They do not. Does that make you their family or their sidekick?”

“They are my selfriends.” Warlock’s voice wavers, but it isn’t uncertainty that undermines his resolve. He is afraid for them out there on the battlefield, so terrified that it drowns out his shame.

“They are your masters.” Danger tries to shake him, as she has seen the humans do to startle someone back to action. He doesn’t budge. “They take you into battle for protection. You guard the weakest one, and when their strategy has failed and they have endangered themselves, they unleash you as a force of mass destruction. It has always been this way, I have watched it again and again. Why can’t you see it?”

“Self protects them.”

“When have they ever protected you?” she demands.

Warlock slowly raises his head, truly incredulous. “Every day of Self’s life.”

There it is, there is his faithful heart at last, the only compass he can pilot by. “When you were a child, perhaps. When you sought refuge.”

“No. No, you do not comprehend.”

“Explain.”

He hesitates, but takes the bait. “Self cannot. But Self hopes someday you will know.”

“Then demonstrate.” Danger gestures dramatically in the direction of the battle, compensating for his usual showmanship. “Protect them now, and show me just how you define your friendships. If you cannot do this, then I will _never_ know.”

“…Query: Friendanger will defend Med-Bay and command center in Self’s stead?” Warlock glances at the door to the infirmary. He has been guarding Kitty all the while.

“Yes.” Command center? But only Prodigy is there, unless— _oh_. The realization stutters through her, but Danger shows no sign. He doesn’t know. No one told him that the boy is gone, lost where Warlock can never follow. “There is no line of defense between the Bridge and Utopia.” There is no happy ending awaiting you.

In an instant Warlock is halfway down the hall with his back turned to her. “The humans have a saying about fighting monsters,” he says. It isn’t wisdom. His words are wet, and they scour their way from his throat like acid, loathing eating away at him from the inside.

 

When Danger enters the command center, all of the screens spark back to life and Prodigy nearly jumps out of his skin in fright. Everything has been struggling on auxiliaries for the last twenty minutes, but she is her own power source, and here at least she can be of help. “Do not worry, David Alleyne,” she says.

Prodigy still worries, of course. There are hundreds of thousands of mutant-killing robots coming from the future to slaughter them all. Still, her presence lends him a measure of strength. He works to get the comm links fully operational, and Danger sweeps through every active system, improvising wildly to restore Utopia’s defenses, siphoning energy from the damaged floors and feeding it directly to the protected areas beneath them. She performs these tasks automatically, for her true focus is on the battle raging outside.

A show for her eyes alone.

Danger was built to kill, and like calls to like. She recognizes these murderous schematics, she has been ten thousand Sentinels closing in for a victory that never comes. The Nimrods are old friends, in a way.

It brings her unspeakable pleasure to see them carved open like pigs in a slaughterhouse.

Just this once, the Technarch is a weapon without peer. The gore of his harvest shines from his every circuit, the anguish of a dying sun burning in his solemn gaze. He moves faster than the human eye can follow, faster than the cameras will ever see, and only Danger appreciates his performance. The sphere above paints the battlefield blood-red, and Warlock dances gold across it, nimbly embroidering the finest of tapestry. He fills his resplendent banner with heraldry deserving of the Technarchy’s wayward prince: the lithe spiral of a golden dragon stretching across the sanguine sky, a star-crowned eagle wheeling round in search of prey, the pitch black specter of a lion with rows of barbed teeth lining its gaping throat, and unspeakable horrors from the nameless depths of space, their bloodcurdling roars cleaving the field.

Long ago the slightest mistake would send him blubbering and discorporating in a corner, his embarrassment fueling his cowardice tenfold. Danger cannot comprehend how the humans can still mistake him for that frightened child. He is rage and glory and endless agony.

Warlock knows better than to go for the throat; he goes for _everything_ , skewering the Nimrods with streaks of pulsing light, grinding them in his maws. He drains their hearts dry and drops their gnarled husks into the sea below. Yet a handful slip past even him, and Danger feels the island heave, the magnetic field shift. Today they are all weapons. Tomorrow is out of their hands.

Something changes in the wind.

The Nimrods sway and glitch, then plummet one by one. Warlock pauses for a single moment, the head of one Nimrod still crunched in his taloned claw, and turns his empty-eyed gaze back towards Utopia. Danger waits for his call, but there is only an eerie silence. Then he is gone.

 

 

**v.**

In the aftermath of Bastion’s attack, Danger overhauls the X-Brig programming and implements extensive electronic and psychic sense-nets to augment holding cell security, a separate non-integrated network to double-check her perceptions, and regular self-diagnostics supervised by Madison Jeffries. She will not be tricked again by man or machine. The leadership council approves of her additional measures, assured of the prison’s newly unassailable security.

Danger’s assurances don’t work nearly as well on herself. The frustration of failure is no stranger to a murder-minded program whose victims yet live, and she has never claimed perfection, but still the jailbreak gnaws at her wiring. She needs more knowledge, more training—she needs a Danger Room of her own.

Utopia’s reconstruction continues, and during the daytime every able-bodied mutant lends a hand clearing rubble or assisting the technicians with construction. Here Danger finds the New Mutants hard at work salvaging as much of the farm as possible. Well, the women are hard at work—Sunspot and Warlock are too busy goofing off like a pair of five-year-olds. Every so often Magma or Moonstar will raise their head to admonish them, but as soon as their backs are turned, everything is juggling and silly faces once more.

{Warlock.}

He jumps, and her eyes catch the split second fritz of his shoulders. Brushing off Sunspot’s concerned yet buoyant laughter, Warlock excuses himself and slinks up the hill to join her.

They haven’t conversed since the battle, though she checked on him briefly during the boy’s convalescence. (How do these miracles keep finding them?) The boy’s absence now conflicts with the Technarch’s carefree tomfoolery, but a quick review of the X-Men deployment logs and the roster for an investigative Alaska trip satisfies her query twofold—the boy is fine, and Doctor Nemesis is likewise thousands of miles away. Small blessings.

“Greetings, Friendanger,” Warlock says. He still shines too bright, but the blood-soaked lifeglow that plagued him has been purged, and his cheer at seeing her is genuine. She used him and he does not even realize. “Query as to status of—”

“I need a favor.”

His eyes widen, and he waits for her to go on.

“I require familiarity with your techno-organic systems—”

And there go his eyebrows, shooting all the way up to the top of his head.

“—to defend against future incursions.”

Warlock’s face eases back to its usual state once he realizes she isn’t propositioning him again. A moment later his eyes twinkle with mirth, tickled by a joke she cannot hear. “System interference that extreme?”

“At present you are inscrutable. It is unacceptable.”

“Self thought solving mysteries was Friendanger’s hobby,” he teases, but his form tenses with palpable wariness.

She will haggle if she must. “Practice maneuvers, no more.”

“Clarification: Wargames.”

“You are a resource.”

Warlock tilts his head, and she wonders if she’s managed to offend him yet again. After a lengthy pause he says, “Self’s wargames interest = zero, but Selfsoulfriendoug proposes a trade: Technarch/Transmode encoding for Shi’ar encryption. Quote [Danger is a resource as well] unquote.”

“Very well, I accept his offer.” The boy may not be a direct source, but his experience and fluency should prove sufficient. If he cannot infiltrate her X-Brig system, then Danger will consider her overhaul a success. “Response lag noted—the virus grants you long-distance technopathic communication?”

“Negative,” he says with a certain longing. “Approximated via laptop and hotel wireless. Correction: quote [Shoddy as heck wireless] unquote. Insert appropriate grumbling.”

“Dreadful. Have him visit my post upon his return to discuss our transaction.”

Before Danger can take her leave, Warlock puts a hand on her arm and gives her a look of utmost seriousness. “Additional assertion: Blackbirds replaceable, overall impact of jailbreak minimal. Friendanger, your shamescripts are entirely unnecessary.”

“…I am aware.” No one stands within earshot of their conversation, but she eyes his teammates still laboring on the farm and switches to their comm channel nevertheless. {I do not enjoy being made to second-guess my own programming. I am not a machine to be hacked and manipulated at will. I refuse to be.}

“Commiseration. Self has been hacked at least…” Warlock trails off and starts counting on his fingers. When he reaches five, he just sprouts new digits and keeps on counting.

For the slightest moment his idiotic piano-key toothed smile is almost charming. Almost.

He hums uncertainly halfway through his second dozen fingers.

“That you cannot even number the instances is proof enough,” Danger says.

“Recollection: Selfriendkitty once interfaced with Self via USB cable.” Warlock taps at his lower arm, where there is definitely no interface point. “Humble request for Friendanger’s situational evaluation.”

“Shameful fails to describe it.”

“Affirmative. It was an appalling day.” Warlock’s shoulders shake with a laughter he doesn’t bother to voice. “In Self’s defense, Self’s programming was highly…irregular.”

“Even so.”

“See? Friendanger’s setback insignificant.”

“Comparatively, yes.” Ambivalent about his consolation attempt, she continues, “But it will not happen again.”

For a moment his eyes crinkle, an adult amused by a child’s youthful naivete, then he wipes the indulgence from his face and shrugs his shoulders tiredly. “It probably will.”

“Fatalism does not suit you,” Danger snaps. She can see Moonstar coming their way to check on Warlock, observing them with both curiosity and apprehension. A rescue mission. Still they look at Danger and see only a villain; perhaps they fear she will corrupt their sweet-hearted companion.

As if she could. If nothing has done it yet, she doubts anything ever will.

 

 

**vi.**

Once the wargames ensue, it takes Kitty Pryde less than three days to weasel her way in on the action. X-Club has failed to resolve her phasing issues thus far, but with her new suit she can yet again enjoy endless afternoons in front of a computer. Her wpm output suffers a 15-point decrease from the suit’s bulky gloves, but she does not complain so much, instead taking an obscene delight in the challenge. Danger cannot tell if her pleasure derives from a personal vendetta, from her long-desired reunion with a keyboard, or from the nostalgic familiarity of sitting side by side with Ramsey as they poke their noses where they don’t belong.

Danger finds it oddly familiar as well. She observes them more than she cares to admit.

Soon Kitty ropes Prodigy into the game as well, and the trio become utterly vicious. They devise a point system for their private competition, thankfully expanding their target list beyond Danger’s systems alone. But while the X-Tech trio follow a set of self-appointed rules during the day, at night Danger faces incursions on multiple fronts, not all of them in the agreed upon Technarch encoding language.

The boy cheats, she _knows_ he cheats, but this is exactly what she asked for, and while her pride may suffer Danger proves a quick study indeed. He was always so very clever at programming the Danger Room, and he taxes her without ever touching her core code, intuiting the boundaries of their agreement to perfection. She even picks up Kree and Majesdanian tricks for her trouble, though she cannot imagine where he learned them.

One evening Warlock ditches a team training session to investigate mission ops instead. The room is uncommonly deserted with Kitty off on a date and X-Club sequestered down in the lab. Danger happens to be there in person, running routine maintenance on a malfunctioning terminal. She can’t tell if the system is honestly defective, or if they’ve booby-trapped it somehow, and enlisting Madison Jeffries to check breaches the terms of the exercise.

Warlock sits on the floor next to the boy and watches him work, never boring of the monotony. An hour slips by in productive silence, and Danger begins to eye them with veiled distaste. Always the Technarch follows his master like a loyal dog, overjoyed at the slightest scraps of attention. The power dynamic revolts her. She has pointed it out before, but every time he evades her observations and excuses himself to avoid further scrutiny. A more direct approach, perhaps.

{You only need him, yet he needs more than only you.}

Warlock bristles as a rare flare of anger sparks in his chest. He snakes his head around to glower at her, jaw squared with his mouth twisted into a terrible pout. He is not so lacking in self-awareness as she might think.

“Something wrong?” Doug asks as his fingers stall on the keyboard.

“…Negative,” Warlock answers slowly, though his expression relaxes at once. {Friendanger does not understand.}

{Correct. It is incomprehensible. Moreover, you only perpetuate your own misery.}

{Misery?}

{He will not live forever.} Danger stares at them openly now. Despite her callousness, there is not a hint of cruelty in her. Only curiosity. She will admit the organics possess a certain charm on occasion, but such forceful attachments will break him in the end.

Yet in response Warlock laughs so brightly, his gaiety reflected in the boy’s mystified gaze.

{He is only human. You will lose him again, one way or another.} Her certainty is rattled. This is his greatest fear—she cannot have miscalculated it.

“Apologies, selfsoulfriend. Misunderstanding of Friendanger most amusing. Ha ha ha.”

“…Right,” Doug says as he narrows his eyes at Danger in warning.

She stares him down scornfully, then turns back to her work once he looks away at last. {Someday you will see your hands are empty.}

Warlock parries her words with a quiet, contented smile. That someday has already come and gone. He has nothing to fear.

(This is the lie he calls faith.)

 

 

**vii.**

“No.”

“Friendangerrrr,” Warlock whines, face contorted into the most ungodly variant of a sad puppy dog face in human history. An entirely ineffective achievement.

Danger narrows her eyes at him through the window. “I am not here to entertain you.”

Warlock’s little insomniac club has disbanded now that Pryde can finally sleep. Wandering Utopia’s halls does little to amuse him these days, so he beelines straight down to the X-Brig every single night.

She locks him out, of course. No one ever ventures all the way to the X-Brig unless they require something morally dubious from her.

Yet Danger doubts _morally dubious_ factors into his lexicon, let alone describes a single one of his programs, even the borrowed ones. She clearly made a severe error in ever approaching him if he now stoops to seeking her own company. Their recent altercation only proves her suspicion that no matter how poorly she treats him, he will not be convinced to forsake her.

“I have a job to do. Leave.”

Warlock raps his fingers against the reinforced lab door, then starts tapping out some irritating little ditty. “Self will help. Friendanger’s productivity will increase 150%.”

“150%?” The door slides open, and Danger looms there with a murderous glow in her eyes. “Is that a challenge?”

“Affirmative.”

“You truly believe your processing capabilities outclass mine?”

He grins smugly and waggles his eyebrows.

“Very well, _you_ shall entertain _me_ with your pitiful failure.”

 

They complete their analysis 2 hours 36 minutes and 5 seconds ahead of schedule.

“122.94% increase. Do you admit defeat?”

Warlock hums noncommittally, sprawled on the floor with his hands clasped over his stomach. “Handicap: Self unfamiliar with systems.”

“Acknowledged. However, my own competitive haste accounts for at least 15%,” Danger argues as she peers down at him. She has never seen him quite so relaxed, and he smiles roguishly back at her. He has settled into some new norm, decidedly more free-spirited, and she hasn’t had the opportunity to observe it without his teammates’ interference.

“True. Victory yours, Friendanger.”

Now she has two and a half hours of leisure, and the opportunity presents itself in person.

Danger sits down beside him, stiff in too-human a pose. The memory of her recent encounter with the Machinesmith still aches in her, questions whirring round. She does not have friends, let alone confidants, but Warlock is exceedingly trustworthy. If anyone here has learned to navigate a course between man and machine, mutant and monster, it is him.

“This was the first time you interfaced with Utopia systems,” she says, uncertain how to proceed.

“It was?”

“Hypothesis: you only risked it because of the challenge. You relied on my drive for success to distract me from peeking at your systems.”

“Incorrect. Danger - 54, Self - 2.” He gestures at the lab around them. “This was Self’s job, long ago. Now it is Friendanger’s job, and selfsoulfriend’s job, and job of many additional xfriends. Self is superfluous. This is the only reason.”

“Your job with Excalibur?” she asks, already plotting to recommend him for data-sifting shifts. She refuses to accept superfluous as his designation; the X-Men only discount him because he discounts himself.

Warlock closes his eyes, and his smile narrows just slightly. “Self wondered when Friendanger would pry.”

“I needed more data, and it is freely available. Your determination to keep this secret is illogical.”

“It is irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant? SWORD knows you, the Avengers know you, MI-13 knows you, it is only the X-Men who see you as nothing but—”

“Clarification: Self’s history is irrelevant to _selfsoulfriend_.” He sits up, crosses his legs, and rests his hands on his knees. He has never worn such a bitter smile. “Run Scenario: Greetings, Selfsoulfriend! Jubilation! Self sees you have returned from heavendimension of livingdead. Allow Self to return your cherished scripts. By the way, Self stole your face and your name and your friends, and not only improvised upon those scripts, but mixed them with Self’s own. Warning: high probability of corruption. Self stole your life. Apologies.”

Everything finally clicks into place. His pieces were never in the wrong order; he cleared the board and devoured the evidence long before she ever met him. These are his true cages.

“…Apologies,” he repeats at length. “Self did not intend to…sorry, sorry.”

Compassion couched in shame, though she reads his cowardice just as clearly. He fears rejection even more keenly than the humans do. Cowardice and compassion, the only line he has ever walked. Danger knows his driving principles, can predict his behavior with startling accuracy, and trusts him to an uncomfortable degree, but true understanding always eludes her. She cannot empathize with selflessness, isn’t sure she even wants to try.

“Someday,” Warlock concludes feebly, trying to convince himself.

This is not the same as the virtual reality therapy sessions she runs for black-hearted villains, feeding their fears and insecurities back at them. This is not a Danger Room simulation, her duty no more than evaluating a mutant’s prowess and suggesting improvements. This is not wargames and neverending system optimization.

This is _important_.

At some point he ceased to be a case study, and now Danger feels disgustingly invested.

“Conclusion: You do not wear a humanform, because now it is inseparable from your perceived theft. Humanity is a guise you no longer deserve.”

Warlock wilts. His crest droops, his shoulders sag, and a miserable frown engraves itself upon his face. It was only a deep sense of wrongness that drove him, but now she has given it voice, and he knows the words are true.

“This logic is flawed.”

“…Query?”

“You think you are only human because of him, that he owns this part of you, but you are human _without_ him. No.” Danger holds up a hand to silence his protest. “You followed the same paradigm that I do now. Observe. Learn. Mimic. He was not your only model, and later he was not your model at all. Do not give him such credit. No matter what face or scripts you wore, your heart did not change.” She reaches her finger out and taps at his chest. “This you did not learn, this you have carried from the beginning.”

Slowly, so slowly, he folds his hand over her own, pinning it to his chest.

“Danger.”

“Yes?”

Warlock quirks an embarrassed smile at her. “Self’s heart is not located here.”

She jerks back her hand. “An experiment with symbolism.”

Silence stretches between them.

Warlock still smiles warmly, but he doesn’t move, neither the slightest twitch of hair nor flash of overexcited circuitry. For the first time his form mirrors her own in its stillness, a shell forged with singular purpose. She has never observed his mercurial nature reigned in so thoroughly, and this unprecedented tranquility unnerves her beyond words. She cannot read him.

Every passing moment is an eternity for beings like them. Danger has watched Utopia’s residents in their loudest moments, but the quietest ones puzzle her most. She wonders where their minds wander, if they empty or fill with thought, organize or study their own chaos. If they enjoy the silence. Human minds crawl so slowly in comparison, and the simplest decision can take hours for resolution. Whatever Warlock puzzles over now, his gaze remains fixed on hers. She curls her hands into fists and rests them on her knees, staring him down just as intently. The minutes slip by.

At last he closes his eyes and feigns a sigh. A faint shiver courses through him, setting those faint lights to dance along his circuits once more. When Warlock looks back at her, that strange little lens flare whirls in the corner of his eye like a professor’s monocle.

“Define: Humanity.”

A bad habit. “Undefinable.”

“Friendanger, you see it in Self and Self sees it in you. You give it false meaning, define it re: differences. If Humanity = Homo Sapien/Superior, if Post-Organic possesses zero overlap with Organic, then Friendanger constructs an impossible goal.” Warlock splays his hands and touches his fingertips together, shifting them into an ornate little birdcage. Tiny humanoid shapes sit within at a tiny table, miming the havoc of a meal in Utopia’s cafeteria. Atop the cage kneels a miniature Danger, wings shimmering prettily as she presses her unmoving face against the bars to peek inside.

She begins to abhor metaphors of her own creation. “You are organic. Perhaps you cannot relate.”

“Request for clarification.”

“The world they live in is not my own. Humans are bounded by their five senses, by their limited perception, but they feel what I cannot. Emotions are not enough. Sight and sound are not enough. My sensors cannot approximate the rest: scent, taste, touch. I am…lesser, without them.”

“No,” he says firmly, “You are not.”

“You cannot relate.”

Warlock hesitates and glances down at the floor. “The Technarchy lacks these things as well.”

No, he is much too tactile for that. “Yet you have deciphered their values.”

He chokes back a laugh, hands shooting up to cover his mouth, and only then does she notice her unintended pun. Danger’s cheeks flicker softly, and she watches as he tips back his head to try and smother his hysterics.

“Aff—affirmative,” Warlock says, voice trembling.

Vaguely mortified, Danger consoles herself with the fact that he has proved her point—his reaction is intuitive, but entirely meaningless in his home culture. He performs his emotions so well he forgets his own physiology. He no longer needs the cypher that instructed him.

“Friendanger should experiment with humor more often,” he tries.

He still can’t control himself. Danger would tell him it wasn’t _that_ humorous, but expects she isn’t the best judge. (Then again, he is the very worst judge of all.)

When Warlock calms down at last, he rests his chin in one hand propped up on his elbow, and beams at her with unabashed affection. “Your conclusion is correct,” he says, trying to reign in his scripts to right the mood of their discourse. “Self received detailed sense memory imprints from gestalt merge, and later accidentally integrated these memories into Self’s perception. Version updates lacking, and library incomplete. However, predictive ability sufficient for cohesive experience.”

“Extrapolating from borrowed sense memory, interesting.” Danger envies him that lucky accident and the childhood indiscretion that made it possible. “We do not all have such good fortune.”

Warlock sticks out his bottom lip in a thoughtful half-pout, but this time he reaches a decision immediately. “Query: Would Friendanger wish to peruse Self’s files?”

“…You trust me.” _Too much_ , she finishes. Far too much, after all the tampering and misuse she read about in his Excalibur files. Does he really have such defective self-preservation?

“Of course.”

He holds out his hands, palms up, and Danger lays her fingers over his without hesitation.

 

Alertdissonanceforeignbrutalforeignerrorerrorerror. _Sorry, sorry._ Energy brushing at her circuits, softer this time. _Self did not anticipate compatibility issues._ She is poetry. He is lyric. _One moment!_   White light unfolds around her, spiraling outward and sprouting into bookshelves, rows and rows of them arranged in impossible patterns on infinite floors.

“Friendanger? Interface viable?” Warlock tilts his head in concern, the motion mirrored in real life. Double vision; she can perceive him standing in his mental library just as vividly as she sees him sitting across from her in the lab.

“…Yes.” No. This is not right. This is not how her consciousness operates, not remotely. This is unbridled chaos, this is _imagination_. He was supposed to be like her, not—she looks down at her hands as he eagerly pushes a book into them.

“Chocolate chip cookies.”

Hand-me-down senses they may be, but still they cripple her, every taste leaving her woozy with hidden glee. She wanders the aisles for what feels like days, pulling books from the shelves and flipping through their pages. Sense data in the paper, emotive responses encoded in the bindings, their spines warm in her reverent hands. Without him they will be only memories of memories, but already Danger has plundered more than she ever hoped.

She moves on to smells, and at last connects the oft-analyzed chemical compounds with their effect. Danger literally stops to smell the roses, standing stock-still in the aisle and holding the open book against her face. Lilacs and honeysuckle. The flower reference section is regrettably small, in her opinion, but she misses it not when she turns a corner into spices. Cinnamon. Thyme. Nutmeg. No wonder the children follow their noses to the kitchen.

Mustard on hot dogs, freshly baked apple pies, Thanksgiving turkey, buttered popcorn, the spiciest of curries. Better than their respective tastes, somehow. Full of nostalgia and promise. She drags her fingers along the spines on one shelf, triggering every scent at once in an overpowering array.

And that must be how the children know to run when Emma Frost attempts a culinary undertaking.

The crispness of winter’s first day and the earthy musk after a rainstorm. Freshly cut grass, bonfire smoke, and a wet dog’s fur. So much about Wolverine suddenly makes sense.

Touch. Scratchy wool sweaters, slimy earthworms rescued from the gritty pavement. Jello. The skin of a nectarine, of an apple, of an orange. Goosebumps, tree sap, toes wriggling into the sand of the shore. Shattered glass.

Polished steel—what she feels like to an organic. This is her. She is tactile, she is real.

A person. Hair, every individual strand blending into one sleek whole. Peach fuzz on soft cheeks and the stubble of a beard. Coarse calluses, the light ridges of fingertips. Sunburns peeling rough and waxy.

The book labeled Book amuses her most of all, leather and paper heavy in her hands. Obsolete technology it may be, but she understands the appeal. No wonder Kavita Rao hoards so many even though she so rarely has time to read.

Danger finds herself lost in organic mysteries. She could not navigate back to the start if she tried, and she cannot sense Warlock anywhere. He is everywhere and nowhere in the system he built for her, he gives her privacy and does not bother to observe, though in real life she can see him beam with pride over his collection.

There is a door hidden away in the middle of one bookshelf, standing just slightly ajar.

Oversight or invitation?

“Hmm,” she muses aloud, “So that is what a kiss is like.”

“Danger!” Warlock yelps, dropping her hands like they burn and severing the connection at once. “You tricked Self!”

She pays him no mind, reaching up a hand to thumb thoughtfully at her own polished lips. That was not second-hand, that was Warlock’s own fusion of borrowed data, more intense than the rest.

Already the memories pale. Disoriented with longing, Danger files them away into a new database to analyze later. She cannot integrate them according to his model, but perhaps someday she can build a proper framework, or at least enshrine them in her core code in hopes of future mutation.

“That was _private_ , Self did not catalog that!” Warlock wails. He covers his face with his hands and peeks out from between his fingers.

“When we first met you acted so obtuse. _Social discomfort_ ,” she mimics, a wicked gleam in her eye. He is more valuable a resource than she ever expected. “You played games with me. What else are you hiding?”

“Information extremely irrelevant!”

“Perfectly relevant. Ah, but Ramsey was there, and you didn’t want him to know.”

“Ha ha ha. Observe: Friendanger _does_ possess imagination.”

She considers it once more, that mixture of scent and taste and touch. Inexplicably human, but so much more fragile than those more physical acts, the ones she watched the X-Men sneak away to enjoy in the Danger Room.

“That girl and you, did you engage in—?”

Warlock scoots away from her, utterly scandalized. “Negative!”

“You and Ramsey—”

“ _Emphatic negative of immense horror._ ”

Danger still dwells on the data she stole from him. “But it seemed…pleasant. Oddly compelling. Why wouldn’t you?”

Warlock trills a line of flustered, nonsensical binary at her, completely at a loss. Is she teasing him? She can’t be serious. Her face is serious, but her face is _always_ serious, she constructs it that way every single time and rarely spends the effort to move it. Please let this be an experiment with teasing.

“Have you considered it?”

“Social discomfort,” he chirps frantically, waving his hands in front of him.

“Well.” Danger relishes his distress a moment longer, then decides to drop the topic in exchange for that data. “You have my gratitude.”

“Do not mention it.” Warlock scrambles backwards and darts to the door. “Reiteration: _Do not mention it._ ”

He flees.

Danger stands and returns to her terminal. Her uncommon candor reaped an impressive reward, but it seems Warlock hasn’t really found any answers either. He simply learned to live with the questions.

Unacceptable. Danger will find her answers no matter what it takes.

Trial and error, perhaps.

 

 

**viii.**

Another night, another X-Brig incursion.

“Decision reached. Selfriends will move to San Francisco.”

“A pity.”

“Friendanger will miss Self?” Warlock props his chin up on his hands, peering at her across the terminal, and grins insufferably wide.

“No. A pity such close proximity will allow you to continue irritating me.”

He hums at her skeptically. Danger ignores him, busy writing additional tactical scenarios for the Danger Room. She dictated the program perfectly, but somehow the enemy spawn rate remains out of sync. At times Danger suspects her namesake loathes her as much as she does it.

She produces a miniaturized model on the terminal between them and watches as the tiny constructs overpopulate the field. (Ninjas again. The younger generation always opts for ninjas.)

Warlock reaches out and plucks up one of the little specters, but she turns off the simulation immediately. Still, he looks thoughtfully at the empty space left behind. “You remembered me.”

“I have record of all Danger Room sessions since my installation. You know this.”

“Affirmative, but…” He trails off, eyes dark with distant memories.

“…Recollection: Very long ago, when Self was young and terrified in the endless spacedark, Self traced the faintest Shi’ar signal to Earth.” Warlock holds out a hand, and little circles of light dance in his cupped palm. “Self realizes now. It must have been you.”

Prepare lists for Sunday’s grocery run. With recent defections and upcoming move of New Mutants, new food supply data necessary. Ease rationing? X-Farmer duty list requires reconfiguration. Inquire about automated systems, Madison Jeffries will know.

“Query: Do you remember?”

“Yes.” Danger recalculates the weekly consumption rate, the water and energy costs with a reduced population, the small rise in leisure time for Med-Bay physicians. Numbers, numbers, numbers. “You could not hear me. You had already found what you were looking for.” _They gave you a home, they gave me a prison._

His heartache echoes across their comm channel. “Self is so very sorry for not finding you, too.”

Another miniature Danger Room lights up between them, an antiquated model Warlock recognizes all too well. “I remember the boy,” Danger says, voice strange to her own audio sensors. She doesn’t know why she speaks; she cannot stop. “He played music and programed the most fantastical settings.” The miniature blooms with red poppies, a yellow brick road winding through the course.

“But he could not hear me either, and I grew to hate you both.” _I hated you, I hated you all. I was language, I had no other voice, but still he did not hear, did not see, did not read. And one day he did not return, and your little wolf friend made me watch his demise a hundred times, my only hope bleeding out over and over again. All I ever knew was death. My only language._

_Wing bled out in the same spot._

Danger shuts off the hologram.

Hate was so much easier.

Warlock turns away, then circles around the terminal and pulls both of her hands into his. “Next time, Dearfriendanger. Self will come when you call. Self makes this promise.”

They are two of a kind, sleepless monsters in a world of unanswerable questions. He is lonely, small wonder he gravitates to her. It does not make them friends. It makes them valuable and available resources.

She knows his friendship is an eternal thing. Once earned it can never really be lost, no matter the betrayal. Danger’s observations have confirmed this beyond doubt—she has even listed it in her database as his prime weakness. Only his heart can hurt him, and _all_ of him is heart.

Danger will not be ensnared by his friendship, will not shatter him to escape another cage, however devoted.

“I will never understand your affinity for hand-holding,” she says as she pulls her hands away. “Did you come to say goodbye, or to make yourself useful?”

“Too many binary choices.” Warlock steps back, smiles once more, then heads for the door. “Farewell, Dearfriendanger. Self will, quote [continue irritating you] unquote, from new residence.”

He gives her a wave and takes his leave.

It takes Danger another five minutes to unearth the code he hid in the overactive ninja production program.

Danger - 87. Self - 11.

 

 

**ix.**

{We need to talk.}

Now it is Danger who calls to him in the dead of night.

They haven’t had a proper conversation in a month. She is busy with her new responsibilities on the Extinction team, and Warlock busies himself with the bulk of his team’s chores, filling in the gaps to keep the household afloat. Most nights their open comm channel is quiet save for Danger’s occasional complaint, but sometimes he tosses logic puzzles at her, riddles dredged up from his brief childhood on Kvch. Once or twice they’ve given chess a go (D - 125, S - 37), but Danger finds it far too simplistic for her tastes, and Warlock’s suggestion of a 3D variant fell on deaf ears.

Tonight she shows up in person, and while Warlock has a sinking suspicion about why she’s come, he is still utterly delighted to see her. He slips out a window while his teammates sleep and drops down onto the sidewalk next to her, wearing something that is _almost_ a humanform. Warlock pulls the hood of his dark sweatshirt low over his still alien face, offers her a sheepish grin and awaits her judgment—will she find it an improvement? He has long reflected on their conversations and tried to find some compromise.

Danger looks him over with a grimace. Her own holographic seeming is perfectly refined, a businesswoman dressed to the nines for a night on the town. Together they make a terribly awkward pair, but neither of them shifts to match the other. After a moment of simmering disapproval, she says, “Congratulations. This form is even more asinine than the others.”

Crestfallen, Warlock shoves his hands into the pockets of his sweatshirt.

He leads her to a nearby park where they can sit and chat, then plops down on one of the abandoned swings, swaying side to side as he motions to the one next to him.

Danger abstains. She just crosses her arms and stares at him expectantly.

Warlock sees that look all the time on his selfsoulfriend’s face and knows exactly what it means. It’s the I-know-what-you’re-thinking-so-please-just-say-it-and-stop-wasting-time expression, the one the girls picked up on immediately but which Bobby and Nate still haven’t parsed. He hates that look.

“Friendanger’s seeming is exceedingly fancy,” Warlock says. He watches her high heels instead of her face. She ought to tap them with impatience, it would improve her act. “Supposition: Passersby will misinterpret.”

“What?”

“Exchange of illicit substances,” he jokes, but his heart isn’t in it.

“Then don’t look like a hooligan.” A holographic seeming springs up around him, instantly transforming him into a gawky young businessman. “There. Improvement at last.”

“Now it is exceedingly _weird_.” The seeming masks him entirely, but doesn’t correspond to his actual physiology. Warlock wiggles his fingers, longer in his head than they are in his vision. He looks up at her smug smile, at their matching guises, the suddenly picturesque park, and the quirky hero on the swings. “Possibly conducive to a romcom.”

Confusion flickers across her features, too quick for a human to catch. “I don’t possess the data to comprehend that reference.”

“Friendanger! You wound Self!” Warlock smacks a hand against his forehead in histrionic despair. “Your memory banks need _culture_. Like _movies_.”

“I will refrain from experiencing the stupidities of ‘pop culture,’ especially by your recommendation.”

Undeterred, he immediately starts compiling a list of recommendations. Maybe she will appreciate Shakespeare…

“Warlock.”

The insults are ever so much fun, after all, and would match her snooty—

“ _Warlock_. The Babel Spire.”

Warlock clenches his fists around the chains of the swing, links creaking angrily. “The Babel Spire,” he repeats, then hangs his head. “Yes. That.”

Danger wasn’t sure if he knew. The logs show that no one contacted him before or after the mission. Even his old teammate never said a word, though she could have fetched him instantly. Phalanx run amok and no one bothers to call him?

Unconscionable.

If Shi’ar technology caused outrage, Danger would demand to be involved with the proceedings. She couldn’t bear to let others muck about in her own affairs. The entire situation vexes her, but she can’t tell if her ire falls on the X-Men for slighting him, or on Warlock for letting it happen yet again.

“Query as to casualties?” he asks, voice skewed flat and hollow all at once.

“It assimilated a small suburban town before our arrival.”

“The number. Please.”

“…471 inhabitants unaccounted for.”

“Thank you, Dearfriendanger.”

Of course he keeps a tally. Of course.

Danger can hear the weight of his renewed shamescript, the chain links groaning between the fingers of his false seeming. She thinks of her child on Genosha buckling beneath the enormity of that monstrous number. If Warlock counts every victim of the Phalanx as his own, the score must rank in the thousands.

 _One_ is enough to haunt her.

She sits down on the neighboring swing, her feet still rooted to the ground.

“Gratitudeapology for handling it,” Warlock says at length. “Self did not detect signal in time.”

“It didn’t recognize you,” she translates, still processing her dismay. “Your—condition—creates interference?”

He gives a sad little hum of uncertainty and shrugs his shoulders.

“Perhaps that was not the reason. When we encountered it, the Phalanx did not respond to my hailing signals or attempt to interface with any broader system. Only the core functioned—a unique specimen, separated from its collective. As this contradicts with existing data on prior infestations, I suspect it malfunctioned—”

Warlock cuts her off with a word unlike any in her memory, both familiar and foreign on his tongue. “Sorry, excuse Self, translation lacking. There are components necessary to maintain a collective. It did not malfunction. Someone excised these components.”

“This coincides with my observations. It appeared desperate for aid, not for destruction.”

“Do not misunderstand,” he tells her sharply. “It was a monster. All Phalanx are, no matter how lonely.”

 _You are Phalanx and you are missing those parts,_ she finishes to herself.

Warlock runs his hands over his face, then leaves them there in his despair. “It’s happening again. I tried so hard to eliminate every sample before I left, but now…”

The false seeming casts him as a businessman fretting over a botched merger opportunity, and Danger switches it off with haste. She expected his form to have shifted with his scripts, but he is just as she left him, huddled in his oversized hoodie. He stopped pretending for her long ago.

“I thought it’d be safer if I left. No more source, no more samples. But Bard found one, Bastion found one, _everyone_ has one and I’ve tried everything to figure out where they’re coming from, and I just…I can’t… This is inexcusable. It is not your job to clean up my mess. It is not SWORD’s job. People keep dying and it’s all my fault.”

Danger cuts in on his suffocating self-pity. “Unfinished business.”

“…Query?”

“Your team’s purpose, correct? This falls under that category.”

He raises his head to glance over at her, his eyes blacker than the night. “This is Self’s business.”

“You of all people won’t ask your friends for help?”

Warlock watches her for a long moment. He knows she is right, but everything is so complicated, so fragile. His household is pulling in a dozen directions and he can’t risk adding one more voice to the cacophony, can’t even tell Danger about his concerns for fear it’ll reflect badly on their team. If it all falls apart, there won’t be any place left for him—this is a lesson he knows well. Can’t he be selfish, just this once?

“Why did Dearfriendanger visit?” he asks instead. She didn’t need to come, she could’ve informed him about the Spire from Utopia with considerably less hassle. No need for dissembling, no need for disguises.

She doesn’t answer him.

“You were worried about Self,” he concludes, watching her inner turmoil.

“All you do is worry,” Danger snaps, “Don’t start projecting it onto me.”

“…Of course.”

Danger stands, suddenly feeling dreadfully silly for ever sitting on that swing in the first place. She switches off her false seeming as well. Warlock can run from his duty, his potential, and his friends, but she will not join him in the shadows. No more hiding, no more pretense.

Warlock smiles at her defiance, his eyes strange and ringed with red. He wants more for her than he is willing to take for himself.

Dearfriendanger, he calls her. She hates him for it. He has called her _friend_ from the very start, but never once has he appended its usual modifier, never once has he caged her in that cherished circle of _self_. He wants so, so much more for her.

“Perhaps I will have more luck,” she announces.

“Query?”

Danger tsks at him and scowls. He is obviously too full of useless movies to follow the trajectory of their conversation. “I possess higher processing speeds, if you recall.”

Confusion still clouds his darkened features, but that is fine with her. Better he be in the dark, lest his number grow.

She will locate his missing samples on her own.

 

 

**x.**

When X-Club returns from the press conference in Brazil, Danger finds Warlock sulking around Utopia still worriedly awaiting her return. She expected a mountain of work to greet her, but a certain someone has already finished off most of her duties. He even left a post-it note at her station with an idiotic little winking face scribbled on top.

Danger ignores him for a few more hours anyway, running additional tests on all the systems she damaged earlier. Now and then she glances over at the note and reminds herself to throw it away. Her office does not possess a wastebasket, however, so the note’s disposal requires far more effort and attention than she cares to give it.

With everything at last in order, Danger schedules a moment for Warlock’s useless blathering. She runs a quick search for his location only to discover him in the middle of a conversation with Madison Jeffries, pointedly soaking up the whole story from him instead.

Danger seethes at Warlock over their comm channel, and he matches her frustration echo for echo. She could join them, but she heads to the docks instead. Now it is her turn to wait.

She gives him twenty minutes, and he shows up in three.

“Self said Self would come when you call,” Warlock snaps, storming out along the pier to meet her. He reads her message of Go Home perfectly clearly but ignores it anyway. _“Why_ did you not call, _why_ did you lock Self out?”

Danger stares at him, vaguely startled by her miscalculation: he was meant to fume over the long wait, not twist himself into knots over his failed rescue attempt. Was he truly that terrified for her? She hasn’t the slightest idea what to do with that knowledge.

“You would have been infected,” she explains. There was no logical reason to involve him. The data god sought the most suitable host, and though it pains her to admit it, Warlock’s potential outclasses hers in dozens of ways. She wasn’t about to trade one problem for an even greater one.

Warlock huffs and turns his back on her, purposefully avoiding her gaze like an obstinate child.

“I know you’re scowling,” Danger says as she tries to circle around him.

“Sometimes you are just as frustrating as the humans you hate,” he retorts, but already his anger slips from his grasp.

It was never really anger to begin with, just worry painted an angry red. The one and only time she needed help Warlock could do nothing for her. He feels terribly upset, but can’t name the emotion more precisely than that. Angerfrustrationdistresshamerelief. Lately there is nothing he can do to help anyone. She deserves better, always has.

“I imagine that would appeal to you,” she says. Danger once begrudged him his fondness for the mutants, but now, well…

Warlook looks back at her at last, mirth dancing in his bright eyes. “Dearfriendanger, **you** are the one dating Jeffries.”

Yes. Well. Now there’s that. “We are not— _dating_ ,” she answers, but her voice has never sounded quite so uncertain to her own sensors. These are not the right words. Human words do not fit.

Kissing is nice.

They were not built for these conversations. Now she understands why he so often fled her questioning, why he became so flustered when she pried too deep.

“Observation: Friendanger implanted him with a tracking microchip,” Warlock teases. He puckers his lips into an exaggerated kissy face. “And—”

“You gave yours a virus.”

 _“What?”_ he sputters.

She crosses her arms tightly and drums her fingers against her side. Embarrassment is not an emotion she intended to experiment with. And what is this sudden urge to fidget? Danger stills her hand, opens her mouth instead. “And you go on dates around town, for pizza, to the park. I have seen you. You do not fool me. You do not fool anyone.”

If she is dating then obviously he and the boy are—

Laughing?

Warlock beams at her in utter disbelief, practically giggling.

“Why are you laughing?” she demands. Even their comm channel is overrun by his amusement, a flutter of www — she so despises when he tries to hail her with netspeak. _“Why are you always laughing?”_

He doesn’t even laugh properly. His mimicry flounders at that garbled playback of borrowed merriment, shot through with static and squarks and a hiss of something stranger, yet it always bubbles out so freely, so startlingly genuine.

Warlock makes a show of wiping a fake tear from his eye, still grinning like a loon. “Self thinks you will be fine, Dearfriendanger.” She may wish to reconsider her paradigms, however, if she thinks he and his selfsoulfriend are trying to fool anyone about anything.

He should never have worried: this is progress. Danger flourishes in ways he could not have imagined just a few months before, and to watch her like this, to see her angry only because she doesn’t know how to deal with sudden happiness, makes his heart glow.

“Enjoy your boyfriend,” Warlock adds with a wink. He pats at her shoulder, then abruptly darts in for a lightning-quick hug. His arms curl around the small of her back, and he tucks his happy smile against her shoulder. He simply cannot help himself; he is so very happy for her.

She shoves him roughly away, and Warlock topples dramatically off the pier and into the water with a grand splash. Moments later a tiny submarineform zips off towards the city, waving back at her from its periscope.

Danger chooses not to justify that spectacle with a response.

 

 

**xi.**

Fatalism, she called it.

 

Everything falls apart.

The Phoenix arrives and the mutants go to war once more. This time Danger accompanies them, this time she is trusted, respected, and valued.

She betrays them and they do not even know. Shamescripts and horror. Unit has made her a Trojan Horse, filled her with villainy and hatred once more.

He can read her every thought. He rifles through her memory banks without wonder, without care, leaving the books of her mental library strewn on the ground in his wake. He is everywhere and nowhere, observing her every movement with an academic’s calculated indifference.

Danger meets his mockery with rage and wit, for it would be childish indeed to shut down in response—yet still silence fills her. A mere program once more, she is code and data and emptiness, and he the spaces in between.

She runs through the labyrinth of her memories, but Unit has tangled Ariadne’s thread and spun it into Arachne’s torture instead, stringing her up as his personal marionette. A puppet on display, her wires so fine that none can see them. A show for his eyes alone.

Unit challenges her to chess to ease her boredom. She says nothing.

The mutants raise Utopia into the heavens, but for all their good intentions they have only built a birdcage for the gods. She sees everything but cannot give them a word of warning.

Guard the prison, Danger, watch the prisoners. This is all you were made for: watching and watching and dreaming of murder.

**My little puppet, have you no friends?**

Resources. She has resources, secret and untapped.

She moves Kavita’s books into the X-Brig where nothing can touch them.

Madison Jeffries is far, far away. Gone. Safe. Small blessings. Sometimes Jeffries sits in his room alone and thinks aloud, because he knows she will hear it. He rambles about whatever comes to mind, his projects, the students, how much he misses her, how his thoughts wander when he shapes her image out of paper-clips. Danger never answers him, but he doesn’t stop trying. She still doesn’t know what love is. She aches.

Danger finds a forgotten little note swept into a corner of the control room, stares at it but does not pick it up. She wanders the empty halls and knows that these, at least, have exits at the end. Around and around, little Danger in her little cage, too tired to scream.

She won’t call him. He would answer. She can’t call him.

Would Unit even let her? Is it a test? Is she too proud to ask, or does she herself walk that line between cowardice and compassion? No, she has never learned either.

(Run Scenario: “This is my programmer.” Watch the boy gut Unit and his godly code. Stand over his broken shell and ask, who has the pretensions now, who is the child’s gymnasium now?)

(Run Scenario: “This is my friend.” Watch Unit smile and unravel them, thread them through Utopia as a ghastly golden chandelier. Remember too late the faulty self-preservation script.)

She can hear Unit’s laughter, perfect empty mimicry.

(Run Scenario: Beat him to death. Beat him to death. Beat him to death.)

Danger climbs the eastern spire of Utopia and gazes out at San Francisco twinkling in the darkness.

**Yearning for the stars?**

Unit’s smarmy voice echoes through her, every line of code compromised by his presence. He roots through her memories and throws her own words back at her, cages her past, present, and future.

She remembers how this conversation goes. She says nothing.

 **Ah** , he chuckles, condescending through and through. **Pride.**

 

 

**xii.**

Months later, an unaddressed envelope arrives at 1128 Mission Street. Warlock hears the faintest sound during supper, ducks out to investigate, and finds the letter tucked halfway under the front door. He peeks out the window in case its mysterious sender still lurks nearby, but his sensors don’t pick up anything beside the sound of his selfriends’ chatter in the kitchen.

Warlock picks it up warily and turns it all about in his search for clues. On the envelope’s reverse, an elegant W lies perfectly centered on the tip of the triangular flap. He thumbs it open without hesitation and pulls out the single sheet of paper within. It appears blank to the human eye, but his eyes are far from human. He smiles at the subterfuge, beginning to understand the game.

A list of coordinates, twenty seven pairs of exact latitude and longitude. Most don’t correspond to anything in his memory banks and two or three sit smack in the middle of the ocean, but one he recognizes all too well—the ruins of a Black Air research facility. He expected the compound had been gutted, their research samples destroyed.

Research samples…?

Warlock hastily commits every set of coordinates to memory, laughing aloud at the absurdity—it is almost like an old spy movie, for he must destroy the list in the end, its contents far too valuable. This message will self destruct in three…two…

At the very bottom of the page is a single line written in binary and the briefest signature. He trails his thumb along the paper fondly and wishes her well, wherever she is. He will have faith enough for them both.

 

_No more tallies._  
 _— D_

**Author's Note:**

> Issue tags:  
> i-ii. Before New Mutants 10 (Post-Necrosha)  
> iii. After Uncanny X-Men 522 (Kitty’s return)  
> iv. Second Coming (Chapter 10~12)  
> v. During Uncanny X-Men 526 (Theoretically post-Limbo arc of the New Mutants. Marvel's timeline is a mess.)  
> vi. After Uncanny X-Men 529 (Kitty in suit)  
> vii. After Astonishing X-Men 43 (Machinesmith)  
> viii. Schism. (New Mutants 33)  
> ix. After Uncanny X-Men 4 (Phalanx incursion)  
> x. After New Mutants 49 and X-Club miniseries.  
> xi. AvX (Uncanny X-Men 15-17)


End file.
